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Tuesday, 31 May 2016

Introducing my latest work, Drawn In, a gripping tale that follows what happens when a young woman on vacation in Florence meets a handsome street artist and interferes with his work – the collection of souls.

Wednesday, 25 May 2016

Three Little Pigs (US) is a story that wraps itself around a
wonderful premise. An Italian family in early twentieth century New York is
cursed when the father kills the son of Tonio Lupo, The Scourge Of Brooklyn. Lupo
sets in motion a maledizione which means that the sons of the killer will all
die when they are forty-two years old (the same age as Lupo’s only child). To
do this, he takes his most promising assassin and retires him from the mob, guaranteeing
him a fortune when the murders have taken place. It’s a long-term plan, but the
loyalties and codes of the Sicilian underworld ensure that it’s almost certain
to take place.

The three Frank brothers set off to make their way into the
world. The first is industrious and determined. After his heroics during World
War One, he returns home and rises to the top of the business world. He is
driven by the hope that becoming rich will be enough to save him from the
curse. The second brother is discovered by Hollywood and sets of to make his
way in the movies. It’s his hope that fame will protect him from Lupo’s
maledizione. The third is a waster. He knows nothing of the truth of his own
father’s story and sets about living life to the full while riding on brother
number one’s coat tails.

Peppe Teranova is the man charged with carrying out the
contract. He’s the owner of a pizza restaurant and sets about bringing up his
own children into the world, all the while keeping his eyes open for news of
the Frank boys and making sure he knows exactly where he will find them when
the time comes.

There’s an awful lot to like about this book. Through these four characters, we get to see
the growth of a nation. Each tale is told independently other than at the
points of necessary crossover. The insights and flavours of mafia life as
offered by the narrator are romantically recreated and a joy to read. There’s an element of
tension to the whole thing as we move towards the first of the forty-second
birthdays and the book races away at times.

Thought I really enjoyed this one, I do have some minor gripes. It suffers from some heavy-handed use of punctuation, particularly
early on when the style is emerging. This interrupts the flow and slows down
the energy and pace when it should be at its quickest. The good news is that the work is strong
enough to carry this and it did eventually become almost invisible.

There’s also something of an issue with the final third of
the piece. After being engrossed for much of what had gone before, I found the journey
to the end to be more sluggish than I would have liked. There’s a lot of
introspection and excessive attention to detail and explanation that I didn’t
really need - I bought everything that was thrown my way. There’s also a new element to the whole piece regarding the
reflections of the narrator. This is hinted at early on and is a welcome
addition, I just wish it had been sharper so that my lasting impression of
Three Little Pigs could have been as glowing as the rest of the story deserves.

Don’t let the
previous couple of paragraphs put you off. I’d recommend you give
it a go, especially if you like epic tales or mafia lore. I loved much of it. It’s a huge piece and has the weight and feel of a
novel that might pull in a prize or two in the future. Apostolos Doxiadis is
clearly a master story-teller and is likely to present the world with some
choice tales for us to look forward to.

Wednesday, 18 May 2016

I like the concept behind Is It
Her? (US)
Two fine writers interpreting the art work of the cover to produce a pair of
novellas that complement each other in terms when read together.

There are
similarities, as you might expect. Each has a wartime theme and each deals with
a reunification of sorts after the world has been ripped apart by violence.

The opener, by
Jonathan Hill is a taught, tense piece that explores the lives of four people
whose lives are interlinked as they sit playing cards. Two of the men are going
off to fight the next day. The situation brings out issues for everyone as they
try to come to terms with what’s about to happen. The emotional weight of it
bears down on them all and soon the cracks in their world begin to appear and
then to widen.

This story has the
feel of an edgy piece of theatre to it. The confines of the setting and the sharply
drawn lines kept me in mind of a play where the claustrophobia is palpable and
the tale is told as much through the actions of the characters as their words.

Kath Middleton paints
with broader brushes. Her story is told in two parts, each from the perspective
of pre-war sweethearts as they struggle with the events that wartime brings.
The arc of each story is huge and Middleton has done a good job of condensing
the tale into a novella. There are tasters of what it was like to live through
a war from the battlegrounds of the air and on the home-front and neither side
had it easy.

Each piece works perfectly
well in its own right. The fact that they come together adds value to each and
I reckon there’s more mileage in projects such as this for these authors in the
future.

Thursday, 12 May 2016

Urban
Decay (US)
is an entertaining collection of stories based around a community on its knees
that’s unlikely to be getting up any time soon.

There’s
a nice variety here, both in terms of length and material. They range from vignettes
that hit the spot all the way up to a novelette that allows for more fleshing
out of plot and character. The situations shift from boxing rings, council
estates, bars, gyms, fly-tipping spots, abandoned shops and street corners.

Thorn
is rather skilled at introducing twists where they’re unexpected. A story moves
in one direction and then dashes off at a right angle. This element means you
can never be sure where you’ll be taken and that you’ll find satisfaction when
you come to the end of the road.

I
like the way this collection is layered. There are cold and brutal truths
played out on these pages, there’s humour and tension and there are genuine
sentimental moments that will either warm the heart or are likely to make you
feel grateful for what you’ve got.

Hard
to pick a favourite, but I might go with the opener, Loathe Thy Neighbour. It
sets things up perfectly. A hard man returns home to find his mum is upset with
recent happenings in her neighbourhood. The old sense of community is being eradicated
and someone needs to step in and restore some balance. In this case, the arms
of justice go further than you might foresee. Great stuff.

Thursday, 5 May 2016

In
your wildest dreams, what effect would you want your book to have on your
reader?

My dad was a college professor. He
taught a “Cops and Robbers” course, and one of his students was Charlie Stella,
who has gone on to become a successful crime writer. I remember once—I must
have been about thirteen—waiting for my dad at his office, and I read one of
Charlie’s manuscripts that was lying around in the stacks of paper on the
floor. It was just a typescript, and I read a chapter at random.

It was like nothing I had ever seen. It
was New York City in the late seventies. The young guys were going to a bar for
older women who wanted to pick up younger men. In these pages our guy goes home
with one of the women, gets a blowjob from her. Then when she’s in the bathroom,
prepping for more, he steals her purse and runs off. His friends are waiting in
the street with their car. She sees him going and they shout at each other from
window to street.

Everything was new to me. Not just the
obvious stuff. The whole world. The value system of the book.

Almost all art has the same easy messages.
I read a lot of books and by age thirteen I knew what these messages were: Mean
people are mean. Good deeds are good—and you’ll be rewarded for them; or you
won’t be rewarded and isn’t that tragic? But Charlie’s book wasn’t operating on
any system I recognized.

This sensation is hardly worth talking
about. Whenever I talk about it with someone, they nod and recommend some book
about a psychopath who trades bonds by day and murders coeds by night. So I
must be doing a bad job of describing what I mean.

I doubt Charlie even remembers the
scene. Sometimes art hits you at just the right time.

You
teach literature. Crime novels—literature—what’s the difference?

Not much except that genre books push at
reality a little bit more. There’s a different contract between book and
reader. The reader’s part of the contract is that they don’t complain when in
real life this alcoholic detective would have been fired and sued out of
existence, or when this gun battle at the Space Needle doesn’t cause the city
to lock down. The reader picked up a crime novel, and that was part of the
deal.

Other than that, literature has the same
traits as genre fiction. Every Pulitzer Prize book is a romance, or a mystery,
or a historical novel. There are not that many different stories to tell. But
more serious literature may hold back on some of the easier flavors. Hamlet is a crime novel, but Shakespeare
screwed it up by making his detective too sophisticated. His detective solves
the case right away and spends all his time wondering whether the case was even
worth solving. Who would want to read that?

Influences?

I don’t make a study of crime books.
I’ll read anything that falls into my hands. I read everything by Charlie
Stella. I read everything by Kate Atkinson. I’ve read and re-read the series by
James McClure and Reginald Hill. Every Christmas a friend gives me a shoebox of
paperbacks that he’s picked up over the course of the year, in used-book stores.
I read them all. I have a few days off after Christmas and I read them all.
Often I couldn’t tell you the title of the book I’m holding, or who wrote it.

Isn’t that your dream as a writer? That
an old dog-eared copy of your book gets put in a shoebox with a ribbon around
it? A stranger is lying on his couch, exhausted by Christmas morning, dips
in…..

Bio:

Ross Gresham teaches at the Air Force Academy in Colorado
Springs, and is fiction editor for the journal War, Literature, and the Arts.

Wednesday, 4 May 2016

Lionel Kaspar’s first love is gambling. His second and third
are booze and cigarettes. I’m not sure he has a fourth. His work at the public
health department is easy enough for him to tolerate, but the pay’s poor and he
needs cash to support loves one, two and three. The opportunity arises for him
to take on a position as a journalist with a local newspaper. It doesn’t matter
that he has no qualifications for the job, because he has no scruples either
and just makes them up.

It isn’t long before he’s making up other things either.
Front page stories, for example.

Pretty soon, he’s the rising star of the press and is
enjoying the freedom his new lifestyle allows. The money’s great and he even
starts to appreciate some of the skills in the craft of sniffing out stories
and writing news. The problem is, he’s greedy and the money isn’t enough. When
the idea of blackmailing people with what he knows occurs to him, it looks as
though he’s hit on the magic formula that will give him everything he needs.

Noses are quickly put out of joint. He rattles the cage of
one hack in particular and before long Kaspar’s new life is in serious danger
of being flushed down the tubes. Now that he’s tasted the sweet smell of
relative success, he’s not prepared to let it go without a fight.

Squeeze
(US)
is a brilliant story. The central character is a terrific creation. He’s
cynical, cold and sleazy, but he’s also extremely entertaining and sharp and easy
to hang around with. Rhatigan injects an uneasy tension at each turn and
ratchets up the pressure steadily all the way to the final crisis.

I love the way this tale is hewn from the ordinary and that
the author exploits the flaws in everyday people to drive things forward rather
than simply throwing the kitchen sink at the plot. The whole piece is gripping
and yet nicely understated from start to finish.

I have no hesitation in recommending Squeeze. It’s exactly the
kind of book I want on my kindle. A
definite ace in the hole.